* Russia has spent years financially divorcing itself from the West. China has no economy without the West. Being an energy exporter makes you much more independent than being a manufacturer.
* Taiwan is an island. Invading an island is a much harder task. Also very questionable if they actually have the ship capacity to transfer enough troops. You can't just trickle them in.
* The way Ukraine/Russia conflict is going is likely giving them pause.
True, but by the same token the West (and the rest of the East, and the world) has no economy without China. It makes everything higher stakes for everyone involved.
> * Taiwan is an island. Invading an island is a much harder task.
Also true, but supplying a small island is also much harder than supplying a country with a large contiguous land border with you/your allies. All but one of Taiwan's major ports lie on the strait. And since Taiwan is much smaller than Ukraine, it has less strategic depth than Ukraine; there's nowhere for Taiwanese troops to fall back to.
> Also very questionable if they actually have the ship capacity to transfer enough troops. You can't just trickle them in.
I'm increasingly convinced that China's first act of war won't be shipping troops to the beaches but a blockade. That then presents the US with an unenviable choice: escalate to a full on shooting war to break the blockade, or give control of Taiwan's imports/exports (which is to say, Taiwan) to China.
OTOH China believes that their balance of military power is increasing relative to Taiwan and the west so an invasion will be easier in the future. Better to wait than invade in 2023.
Assuming the CCP is willing to throw the PLA(N) into a charnel house, there are certain scenarios where they can trickle them in after a fashion. The eastern seaboard of China has more than 500,000 fishing vessels that can be mustered across the Strait, even in inclement weather if safety of the boats, crews, and the fire team to squad level passengers and their gear was ignored.
QUAD and Taiwan together doesn’t have enough missiles and anti-ship weaponry to sink enough of these boats to avoid a beachhead being established. In inclement conditions target acquisition of the small boats is very difficult. Not all boats need to hold troops. Not all of them need to be manned at all. Plenty of convoying drones in self-organizing meshes can carry supplies and surviving hulls can run aground at the beachhead to offer supply depots plus cover and concealment for manned boats. The CCP could use the massacre of this missile-absorbing force as a pretext to go nuclear on US CBG’s. They could “throw away” these lives on an unimaginably cruel scale.
And still have more than enough troops left over to mount a legitimate invasion with “real” ships after pretty much all missiles are expended.
There are many ways it can go pear-shaped in a hurry for either side. The only winning move is not to play.
Pretending to.
Loosing West as a trade partner will really hurt China but it will not be the end. There is the rest of the world to trade with. China is building trade with Africa, South America, Asia etc. etc.
Besides I do not think a real decoupling will happen bar some major catastrophe. It will be as much economic disaster for the West at its current stage as it will be for China.
As energy importer China can rely on Russia, SA and other oil rich countries whom the US does not love very much. So I'd say they're safe in this regard.
>"The way Ukraine/Russia conflict is going is likely giving them pause."
I do not think China even needs this example. They can just simply wait.
If China started amassing amphibious invasion forces near Taiwan, I’d expect the US to fill Taiwan with every javelin and stinger missile they can spare.
Even pessemsitic estimates of 3-5% growth is plenty to maintain visible QoL upgrades YoY. PRC isn't going to be west for the foreseeable future where decline in standards is much more pronounced. More PRC citizens in T3/4+ cities (where majority are) will be buying their first cars or whatever fancy domestic gadgets are and feel their life is getting better. There's still huge visible improvements happening.
Or that perhaps the directionality of "eating own creators" prediction is wrong, sometimes war is strategically desirable, and if so, it's prudent to prepare population by cultivating nationalism. Which really there hasn't been much despite western reporting, it's more natural generational awakening among younger cohorts who grew up in richer regions of PRC that west isn't all that, especially when they are now trying to contain PRC prospects. By my estimate, right now state of PRC nationalism is more like 6/10 vs most Anglo countries are 8/10s. Fervent nationalism voices are still largely repressed from PRC mainstream narrative while the other "indicator" of PRC nationalism in western rags are some cosmopolitan kids starting to renfaire hanfu costumes and preferring domestic brands. It's nothing. Just like these exercises in response to new US TW policy act.
Yep
Not like some country where switching a figure head every 4 years can keep the peons happy
This is myopic. Yes, the Manchurian Incident was kicked off the invasion of Manchuria and then the Second Sino-Japanese War was a rogue act by a few officers. But that was just the spark that started a bonfire; who piled all the wood up? Who was responsible for the decades of military buildup that preceded it? Were the acquisition of all those battleships and carriers a series of rogue acts as well? Before WW2, the Japanese government spent decades trying to maneuver Japan into being an imperialist world power that could rival America or the UK. The 'ruling clique' of Japan didn't strike the first spark, but they did labor to engineer the circumstance in which such a spark would inevitably find ample fuel to burn.
- Complete shutdown of all businesses not related to pharmacy or hospital, probably until April 2023. This includes factories. Check out on the ground videos by https://www.youtube.com/@xiaorenwu/videos, you will see completely empty malls, subways, and streets. Not only that, you will note all the anger from normal citizens, which is only really publicly visible this year. EDIT: the shutdown is either mandated by city, or voluntarily by the merchant, since nobody is traveling out to shop in fear of contracting covid.
- Few hundred thousand small and mid size business closures/bankruptcies. China does not provide small business relief like US did, so these closures are permanent.
- 37 million covid infections per day https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-23/china-est..., millions of death per day that overwhelms the morgue. Keep in mind their vaccine is ineffective, and re-infection likely to last throughout 2023
- Market laggards like Apple finally moving out of China, and the rest of manufacturing laggards to follow
- Multinational consumer product companies moving out of China or reducing footprint
- Real estate collapse still unresolved
- Demographics collapse still unresolved
- Total debt still unresolved
- Closer alliance with Russia, and alienation from democratic countries. QUAD, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Europe all are aligning against China and Russia now.
So China's only card it can play is, being as sick as it is for at least a year more, is to be a paper tiger. and threatens with empty promise.
China still would lose far more than it'd gain from invading Taiwan. This [1] does a good analysis of the geopolitical consequences of such an action. That said, the same was true about Russia invading Ukraine, but it happened anyway. The right path is to do rigorous analysis but be honest about the uncertainty.
1. https://www.csis.org/analysis/reunification-taiwan-through-f...
* Angry populace? Give them a fresh target for the anger and a fresh rationalization for their suffering.
* Small business apocalypse? Re-tooling for war creates an abundance of new opportunity.
* Loads of debt? Use war as an excuse to default. It is uniquely positioned to rationalize default while minimally impacting credit worthiness going forward.
* Trust issues in savings and real estate? War bonds are totally different!
* Spare men? Send them to die in war. It's the historical solution to the problem.
My inability to assign likelihoods to these bags of problems really demonstrates how little I know about national policy. Then again, wars have historically caught many experts flat-footed, so perhaps nobody else knows very much either.
Everything you wrote before this, and in particular "you will note all the anger from normal citizens" is reason enough to worry that this time it might be more than an empty promise. China may end up needing more than sabre rattling to distract its citizens this time.
I know people in Korla that got together and protested at the police station, and that city is no longer under lock down.
China also just lifted the travel quarantine requirement...
On the ground in Beijing. I don't know what happened last week / the week before, was sick enough. However restaurants were all f-ing full on Christmas Eve.
It seems like that China just played the herd immunity card and get a really sharp wave due to Omicron and ineffective vaccines.
TSMC in talks with suppliers over first European plant: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-talks-with-suppliers...
TSMC ups its Arizona chipmaking investment to $40 billion: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/06/business/tsmc-arizona-investm...
TSMC is has been teasing both the US and the EU but they aren’t going to move anything substantial out of Taiwan.
Best way to deal with this without risking US troops or risking WWIII is to just drain the island of all its talent and ambition.
Same goes for Russia. We should be offering open immigration to anyone fleeing Russia who passes a security check. Drain Putin's brains.
Brain drain from Nazi Germany and the USSR were arguably factors that propelled the US to superpower status in the 20th century.
Imagine what kind of message this sends to people of Japan, South Korea, or Poland.
What an extremely callous and deeply cold-hearted thing to say about an ally. Imagine someone said that about the US?
That's... not reassuring for allies.
Look at Japanese Bonds, Look at Taiwanese resolve, look at Korean growth - Chinese citizens are starting to recognize that the only thing the CCP has left is fear and domination and they aren't going to support it anymore
So the CCP are going to freak out and start acting crazy, in a (hopefully) futile attempt to get people to react so they can mobilize domestically around national pride.
I trust that the Taiwanese people have the resolve, and the US has the resolve to support them in their resistance to these tantrums without overreacting.
I can't comment on the other items, but there's a fairly benign reason for the surge in japanese bonds as of late. It's not because the economy suddenly got better. It's because the BoJ relaxed their yield control policy, presumably because inflation was running rampant and they needed to do something.
The govt just passed a stunningly aggressive military budget
This is high level strategic and intentional diplomacy my friend. Plenty of FP articles discussing precisely this.
Japan: Japanese bonds is taking a breather but a continued strengthening of USD will put serious risk of currency devaluation and its stock market is largely owned by the Japanese central banks.
Taiwan: Not good. DPP made a major election mistake by ignoring that many Taiwanese want to keep the status quo as the reality of their security situation hits-If the US and coalition wanted to defend Taiwan it would start building military bases, so far all they've done is the same approach to Ukraine-talk them over the edge and when conflict breaks out supply them with severely limited weaponry to not escalate risk by being directly involved.
Korea: Major 3ish sigma event coming to its household debt, pension pyramid scheme blowing up, municipal and government bonds tied to a rapidly deflating real estate bubble, the loss of China, its biggest trading partner, responsible for a huge chunk of its GDP. With increased competition from Taiwan's TSMC and its status as a sort of canary in the mine for global trade activity, all of this is creating a perfect storm. But the biggest punch will be its birth rate and it will be forced to turn to uptaking massive number of migrant workers, possible north korean collapse. I would grade Korea to be the first piece of the domino to trigger another Asian Financial Crisis. This time with much reduced bargaining chip as globalization is being phased out and you see all the investments being made outside their respective countries.
China: Major policy errors have put CCP in an impossible place. It's increasingly looking like Russia prior to invading Ukraine. Rapidly declining economy and aging population with accelerating low birth rate. They will not wait until Japan has finished building up its military. There's an angle to this lockdown system in that its a major way to mobilize and isolate large chunks of the population and unfortunately combined with the surveillance apparatus (the largest internal security on earth) and low morale amongst its people contribute to even more urgency to begin conflict.
China is building up, they’re the real historical successor the “it’s Hitler all over again” rather than Russia (maybe they get to be Italy?)
Not only that, but “tough” animals will signal greatly their desire to fight before engaging in the actual fight to intimidate their opposition. The actual fight will come at great cost regardless of power.
Hard times coming our way…
Yeah, you have to start building experience from somewhere. The Chinese Navy is both building many ships [0] (of which many would argue are among the most advanced in the world) and building operational experience [1] [2] [3]. While the Chinese Navy lacks actual combat experience, training if done properly can be very effective in its own right. It's only reasonable that the second largest economy in the world could sustain this level of development. China has the means and the will to build a very formidable navy.
Information coming from China can be suspect and I understand why some think their navy is a paper tiger. However, their ships are very real and their training exercises are also real, all sighted and confirmed by other navies. It's probably best to not underestimate their capability.
[0] https://sgp.fas.org/crs/row/RL33153.pdf go to page 12
[1] https://news.usni.org/2022/05/23/chinese-carrier-strike-grou...
[2] https://news.usni.org/2022/12/19/chinese-liaoning-carrier-st...
[3] https://news.usni.org/2022/12/23/russian-chinese-warships-ho...
The PRC's aggressive disregard for the exclusive economic zones of it's neighbors, paired with backing Russia's travesties in the Ukraine have has erased any goodwill that their refusal to participate in the Iraq War may have generated over ten years ago. It is now utterly transparent that their goal is to greedily gobble up the foundries of those who invent their own technology rather than steal it and invest those R&D savings in weapons they can then leverage to further coerce the smaller and more vulnerable.
